27 September, 2009

So it works. NIS 2010 bought from eBay is actually genuine

This is just a follow up of my last post, in which I was considering getting a license for Norton Internet Security 2010 from eBay instead of purchasing it from Symantec. At that time (2 days ago I guess) I wrote on Tom’s Hardware forum, asking whether or not a license purchased from eBay is legit or not. People advised me to not purchase it from eBay as it could be automatically generated with a keygen, or stolen, or whatever, and it will get blacklisted by Symantec as soon as I’d try to update.

Well, the reason I am writing now is that I actually won the auction on eBay for it and bought it for $16,99, while on Symantec.com is $79,99… and I could not withdraw my bid, as if I was to follow the advices from the thread on Tom’s Hardware. The seller emailed me the license minutes after the auction was closed and I used it to activate NIS 2010 at once. It worked. To my surprise, it worked. It is a license for 3 users, for 2 years. Gave one to my brother, gave one to my girlfriend, and will keep one to use on my own computer. See pictures below, which will show the subscription period and also the screenshot from my Norton account, which did not blacklist this license.Click to see it on my Flickr page

Click to grab the 1280x1024 version.

Click to see it on my Flickr page

Here’s the link to grab the 1280x1024 version.

 

So apparently, everything went fine, but I still do not understand one thing: why it is on eBay that cheap while on Symantec is 4x more expensive.

5 comments :

Hi Criss
In your Norton account there is no retail key for 3 PCs(I can see only trial ones).

In my Norton Account on the website there are 2 products, one which I never bought and it says Not Purchased (if I click and expand it), and under Expiry Date it says Trial. But! For the second product, the NIS 2010 (which I have shared with 2 friends of mine -- as it was a 3 PC license), although it says Trial, it actually displays the license key if I click and expand it.

It confuses me, because it should say 710 days left, just as I read it from the actual NIS 2010 installed on my PC.

I have exactly the same problem as you. After conducting (by chatting) with Norton support center, I found out that my product has already been registered to an unknown e-mail address, probably provided from the seller to the Norton’s store or similar (support representative told me nothing about that) so he could be able to purchase the product, I think. I believe that’s the point in your case and mine. If these addresses had been used by someone else (in order his product to get activated), then you could not be able to activate your NIS in 3 different PCs. Anyway, representative did not tell me that my license could be pirated.

Katerina, I believe you also bought it from eBay, right? The license that the eBay seller provided to me was indeed not used, I was able to use it and activate it successfully on 3 computers, under 3 different Norton accounts. You know the screen of Norton account under Order History? Under mine, this license is NOT displayed, although it works very fine on the installed product. It's weird, and there's however one dilemma left. If it works, even in this way, how is it possible that you get it 4x cheaper on eBay than on Symantec site. There must be a trick.

That’s correct I bought it from eBay. Your license isn’t displayed because it cannot be registered to 2 different e-mail addresses (yours and the unknown one).If you knew the very first address that your product had been registered to, then you would be able to see your current product’s status. If I was a seller and could buy 1000 licenses at once from Norton, I’m pretty sure that I could make a deal to a great discount on these. But I think that eBay’s prices definitely are extremely “strange”, however.

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